In today's information age, data storage systems often manage filesystems that include huge amounts of storage space. It is common for filesystems to include many terabytes of storage space spread over multiple storage devices.
In a dynamic filesystem environment, blocks of storage space often get used, freed, and re-used over time as files are created, modified, and deleted. It is common for such filesystems to include mechanisms for identifying, freeing, and re-using blocks that are no longer being used by the filesystem. Traditional block re-use schemes, which search through the filesystem storage space sequentially in order to locate free blocks for re-use, can result in imbalanced write operations that in turn can impact filesystem performance.